October 31, 2014 | This year marks the 350th anniversary of NewJersey, a milestone celebrated across the state with events and pro­grams highlighting innova­tion, diversity, and liberty. The Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton is marking the occa­sion with an exhibition that in­troduces all three themes. Hail Specimen of Female Art! New Jersey Schoolgirl Needlework, 1726-1860 brings together 150 examples of needlework made in or by New Jersey schoolgirls and organizes them geograph­ically to illustrate connections between the elaborate artworks and utilitarian objects crafted by girls of diverse religious, family, and socioeconomic backgrounds, from the Quaker schools in Burlington County to a luxurious silk-on-silk memorial to George Washington made at the prestigious Folwell School in Philadelphia by a New Jersey native.

October 15, 2014 | What Egon Schiele would have achieved had he lived beyond his twenty-eighth year is a matter to keep art historians up at night. When he died of Spanish influenza in 1918 he had already accomplished an astonishing amount: some three thousand drawings as well as paintings and sculpture of sufficient merit to position him as the heir to the late Gustav Klimt as Vienna's preeminent artist. Whether Schiele would have mellowed into a grand establishment presence or continued as Vienna's delinquent wild child is open to question-and there is certainly evidence to support both suppositions.

In 2005 the Neue Galerie staged a rich exhibition of Schiele's nudes that suggested, in its inevitable focus on his obsessive eroticism, the latter course, while its new exhibition of the artist's portraits gives us a slightly more mellow Schiele, at least in his late portraits such…» More

September 24, 2014 | To understand the significance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's installation of Thomas Hart Benton's ten-panel America Today so many decades after it was created for the New School for Social Research in 1930 and 1931, you need to know a little about the school in those heady days. Founded in 1919, by the 1930s the New School had become the very definition of educational optimism, internationalism, and all things progressive. Its faculty included Franz Boas (anthropology), Sandor Ferenczi (psychoanalysis), Berenice Abbott (photography), Martha Graham (dance), Aaron Copland (music), and eventually W.E.B. Dubois (African-American history) among other luminous makers and doers. For its new building on West Twelfth Street it hired the Vienna-born architect Joseph Urban and commissioned murals by both José Clemente Orozco and Thomas Hart Benton. Those were the days.

September 24, 2014 | Beeville, Texas, is not on everyone's bucket list, but a visit to the Beeville Art Museum this fall will provide a fascinating look at life in the lone star state in the last half of the nineteenth century. Made in Texas: Art, Life and Culture, 1845-1900 brings together Texas-made art and objects that reflect the lives of Texans from the state's admittance to the United States to the discovery of oil at Spindletop and the devastation of Galveston during the hurricane of 1900. Some think the history of Texas is all about cowboys, Native Americans, freedom fighters, and Texas Rangers, but the items on display in Made in Texas reflect the lives of other Texans too-immigrants, former slaves, students, parents and children, silversmiths and furniture makers, painters, and potters. The show is organized by the Beeville Art Museum in collaboration with the Bayou Bend Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is drawn mainly from the private collections of William J. Hill (s…» More

May 9, 2014 | Visitors approaching the grand front entrance of Norfolk, Virginia's Chrysler Museum of Art on its reopening on May 10 could be forgiven for not realizing that a major transformation has taken place. So seamlessly have the flanking wings been enlarged and the gardens in front of them so surreptitious­ly moved forward that it is on­ly when inside that the impact of the seventeen-month reno­vation and expansion becomes evident. In its new spaces and reconfigured galleries the mu­seum presents a fresh look at its collections, with its long­standing strengths in glass and European and American paint­ing and sculpture as well as newer areas, such as contem­porary art.

Within a broadly chrono­logical progression of paint­ing, sculpture, and decorative arts the curators have creat­ed several provocative "inter­ventions": in a gallery devoted to seventeenth-century Italian art, a 1954 Robert Richenburg Pieta so abstract that it takes some looking to discern the image of the dead Chri…» More